We began with a simple classroom gesture:
“This is a narrative.”“This is a report.”“This is a research article.”
The gesture felt descriptive.
It now feels heavier.
Over the course of this series, we have traced a quiet ontological drift:
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From system to instance.
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From cline to taxonomy.
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From probability to membership.
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From recurrence to essence.
What we call a “text type” began as a regularity of actualisation.
It ended as a category.
And somewhere along the way, we forgot the cline.
1. What We Have Recovered
Let us restate the architecture.
Language is structured potential.
Instantiation is gradient.
Register is subpotential viewed from the pole of system.
From the pole of instance, repeated alignments of contextual construal and semantic choice appear as clusters.
Those clusters can be named.
But the name does not create an ontological unit.
There is no stratum in the model called “Text Type.”
There is no system network labelled “Narrative” or “Research Article.”
There are only:
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Contextual configurations,
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Probabilistic semantic patternings,
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Recurrent staging tendencies,
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Institutional stabilisations of expectation.
Everything else is perspective.
2. The Shadow Effect
When actualisations recur across the cline, they cast a shadow.
The shadow looks stable.
It looks bounded.
It looks nameable.
We mistake the shadow for the structure.
But the structure is the system of potential.
The shadow is the pattern produced by repeated events of alignment.
Types are shadows of recurrence.
They never existed independently.
3. Why This Is Not an Abolition
To say that types never were is not to deny their usefulness.
Pedagogy requires simplification.
Institutions require stability.
Labels support shared understanding.
But heuristic utility is not ontological status.
We can use the word “narrative” without believing in Narrative as an entity.
We can teach “research articles” without imagining a bounded class in the system.
The difference is theoretical clarity.
4. Reasserting Instantiation
If we keep instantiation visible as a cline:
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Variation becomes expected.
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Hybridisation becomes unremarkable.
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Innovation becomes reconfiguration of potential.
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Boundaries soften.
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Description becomes probabilistic rather than categorical.
Most importantly, the architecture of system and instance remains coherent.
Register remains what it always was:
A patterned region of potential.
And, at the edge of instance, an event of alignment.
5. A Final Question
When we encounter a text and say:
“What type is this?”
We are asking a taxonomic question.
If instead we ask:
“How is potential being actualised here?”
We are asking a clinal one.
The second question is slower.
It is less decisive.
It refuses boundary-policing.
But it aligns with the ontology of meaning as potential.
6. Types That Never Were
There was never a box called Narrative waiting to be filled.
There was never an entity called Research Article residing in the system.
There were only:
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Structured potential,
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Contextual construal,
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Probabilistic alignment,
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Recurrent actualisation.
The “type” was the afterimage of repetition.
A stabilised construal of patterned events.
A shadow cast by the cline.
If we hold onto that image, we can continue to use our labels — gently.
Without mistaking them for the architecture of language itself.
Only potential.
And its patterned becoming.
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